Amaechi: more jobs ‘ll aid fight against insurgency

The Chairman of the Nigeria Governors’ Forum (NGF) and Rivers State Governor Rotimi Amaechi has said insurgency, kidnapping and other social vices are the fallouts of poverty and unemployment in the land.

The governor spoke yesterday in Port Harcourt when the Senate Committee on Privatisation and Commercialisation visited him at the Government House.

The committee was on a facility tour of Federal Government-owned corporations and agencies in the state.

Amaechi said his administration started creating jobs when he assumed office in 2007 by building over 140 primary health centres and over 300 model primary schools.

He said: “The current problem we are having in Nigeria is tied to poverty and unemployment. I believe that one solution to this insurgency is education and unemployment. The easiest employment is farming. This is because a large number of them are not educated and are unskilled.

“I applied it here in Rivers State and it worked. Most of them who were given guns by the former militants, when we asked them, they told us that their parents could not train them. That is why we introduced free education and free health care programmes. And it occurred to us that to address this problem, we needed social policing. While you are doing physical policing, you must also do social and economic policing.

“To do that, we started creating employment opportunities by building over 140 primary health care centres and over 300 model primary schools. If you visit these projects, there is no way you will not see at least 50 workers in each of the schools.”

The governor added: “We created the banana farms, which has created jobs for over 2,000 persons. We revived the Rison Palm. It was dead when we came, and it has employed over 5,000 workers.

“Also, the Songhai Farm has employed over 2,000 workers, while five fish farms in strategic locations have been completed. We have done all that to create jobs for our people.

“I am very sure that the establishment of farms will go a long way to reduce the recruitment of Boko Haram members. The Federal Government must take education, employment and reduction of poverty as priority. We do appreciate the challenges the Federal Government is facing now.”